Was “America Great Again” after four years of Donald Trump? Maybe for
millionaires and billionaires. So, why do some people still support this
scoundrel? According to neuroscientist Bobby Azarian, “Some people support him
out of ignorance. Basically, they are under-informed or misinformed about the
issues at hand.”
Consider
when he redundantly states the past election was stolen, and they simply take his word for it.
This is called “The Dunning-Kruger Effect. [In other words], the problem isn’t
just that they are misinformed; it’s that they are completely unaware that they
are misinformed, which creates a double burden [for them]. Studies have shown
that people who lack expertise in some area of knowledge often have a cognitive
bias that prevents them from realizing that they lack expertise [or knowledge
and intelligence].”
“As
psychologist David Dunning wrote in an op-ed for Politico, ‘The knowledge and
intelligence that are required to [understand an issue at hand] are often the
same qualities needed to recognize that one is [unwitting] — and if one lacks
such knowledge and intelligence, one remains [completely oblivious] and is
[incapable of understanding complex issues]. This includes political judgment: These
people cannot be reached because they mistakenly believe they are correct
[without the use of logic, inferential and divergent thinking, analysis,
synthesis, common sense, evidence and facts].”
Moreover, MAGA politicians support him because they want to hold on to their power despite the consequential destruction of democracy and the Constitution. And then there are people who continue to support him because of their own selfish greed. Why would
they vote for him again? When he was in office, their rejoinder was usually “It’s the economy.” Of course,
they did not care about millions of people who suffered while he
continued to abet the American oligarchy. There was a flagrant distinction between the success of Wall Street and the failure of main street while he was in office that his followers chose to ignore.
On the other hand, there are those who support him and choose to ignore his seditious and treacherous behavior, his reprehensible ignorance, egregious incompetence, intentional maliciousness, anti-social personality disorder, pathological narcissism, psychopathic dominance, impulsivity, remorselessness, cheating and lying. One can assume they support him because of their illogic, xenophobia, fear, resentment, racism, hatred, anxiety, insecurity, avarice, credulousness, submissiveness and powerlessness….
-Glen Brown
Updated August 2022 and December 2024
For My View on Today's Republican and Democratic Party:
Charles Dickens could not abide willful ignorance.
ReplyDeleteHe states this indirectly and directly in many of his writings. One of his most direct statements is in A Christmas Carol. When the portly gentlemen ask him for a donation to feed the poor because the poor house and other places barely kept them alive with subsistence provisions Scrooge proclaims, "Besides - excuse me - I don't know that."
"But you might have known it," observed the gentleman.
"It's not my business," Scrooge returned.
This was stated after Scrooge had admonished, "If they would die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population."
This mindset is alive and well in America today.
"...'I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,' Trump boasted in 2016.
ReplyDelete"Trump’s 5th Avenue principle is being tested as never before. So far, more than 214,000 Americans have died from Covid-19, one of the world’s highest death rates – due in part to Trump initially downplaying its dangers, then refusing responsibility for it, promoting quack remedies for it, muzzling government experts on it, pushing states to reopen despite it, and discouraging people from wearing masks.
"Yet some 40 percent of Americans have stuck by him nonetheless. They’ve remained loyal even after he turned the White House into a hotspot for the virus, even after he caught it himself, and even after asserting just days ago that it’s less lethal than the flu. A recent nonpartisan study concluded that Trump’s blatant disinformation has been the largest driver of COVID misinformation in the world.
"They’ve stuck by him even as more than 11 million Americans have lost their jobs, 40 million risk eviction from their homes, 14 million have lost health insurance, and almost one out of five Americans with kids at home cannot afford to adequately feed their children.
"They’ve stuck by him even though more Americans have sought unemployment benefits this year than voted for him in 2016, even after Trump cut off talks on economic relief, even though he’s pushing the Supreme Court to repeal the Affordable Care Act, causing 20 million more to lose health insurance.
"Trump is in effect standing in the middle of 5th Avenue, killing Americans.
"Yet here we are, just a few weeks before the election, and his supporters still haven’t budged. The latest polls show him with 40% to 43% of voters, while Joe Biden has a bare majority.
"The most egregious test of Trump’s 5th Avenue principle is still to come, when he tries to kill off American democracy. He’s counting on his supporters to keep him in power even after he loses the popular vote..." (Robert Reich, Common Dreams).